One More Book from García Márquez?

An unfinished manuscript of a novela entitled We'll Meet in August may yet round out the late Colombian writer's extraordinary literary output. Or, possibly, not.

www.theguardian.com

The acclaimed Colombian writer died in Mexico City on April 17. Best known for his magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez may have one more book to add to his remarkable output.

It is not a sure thing, but the world might yet receive a final literary offering from Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who died last week in Mexico City at age 87.

According to a report by the Spanish news service EFE, an unfinished work bearing the provisional title
En Agosto Nos Vemos
– rendered in English as
We’ll Meet in August
– might be published in the coming months, assuming the writer’s heirs decide to go along with the project.

Originally conceived as a sequence of short stories, but later reworked into a novel,
We’ll Meet in August
tells the story of a happily married, middle-aged woman named Ana Magdalena Bach who each year visits her mother’s grave located on a small Caribbean island, a pilgrimage carried out with exacting consistency. Each visit unfolds on the 16
th
of August, and on each occasion she takes the same room in the same hotel – until, one year, she meets a certain man in the hotel bar ...

Two portions of the novel have appeared in print already, both framed as short stories. One was published in the Spanish newspaper
El País
, and the other was printed in
The New Yorker
in 1999.

According to an EFE interview with Claudio López Lamadrid, Spanish literary director of publisher Penguin Random House, García Márquez was close to finishing the work. “But he didn’t complete it because of the perfectionist that he was.”

Best known for his magnificent novel,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, the Colombian writer lived for the past 30 years in Mexico. His last published fiction was
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
in 2004, a novel that South African novelist J. M. Coetzee described in The New York Times as “not a major work.”

We’ll Meet in August
might or might not generate a more generous response, assuming it is ever published in book form. In the meantime, García Márquez’s output was both large and glorious. Readers whose experience of the author may not extend beyond
One Hundred Years of Solitude
have many other works to choose from, including
Nobody Writes to the Colonel Anymore, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The General in His Labyrinth,
and
Love in the Time of Cholera
.

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